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Agree. To the poster who thought Georgetown should be above BU, I know more people who think the opposite. Academically speaking, BU is actually much stronger.
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<p>Get off the drugs dude. How can you seriously say that BU is academically better than Georgetown. I doubt 90% of the kids at BU could get into Georgetown.</p>
<p>haha, WashU was 161st. Schools ahead of it include Ohio State, Purdue, Minnesota, Illinois, and Indiana-Bloomington. Big Ten had some pretty good representation here o.O</p>
<p>Are those UK colleges really that good? I've heard heir facilities are mediocre compared to their US counterparts. Also, is Caltech really better than MIT?</p>
<p>Ohio State, Purdue, Minnesota, UIUC and Indiana are all world class universities.</p>
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Ohio State is a world class university
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<p>That's the biggest crap I've read in my entire life!</p>
<p>This is just plain silly...</p>
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That's the biggest crap I've read in my entire life!
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<p>Ah but it is, and you coming from Michigan ... well lets just say there might be some bias? ;P</p>
<p>Don't call "silly" the most respected educational publication in the world.</p>
<p>i love how so many people denounce this yet we're all U.S. news whores</p>
<p>i still dont know how they calculate rankings, only what they've changed. can i get a link anyone?</p>
<p>U.S News rankings are actually sensible. This isn't. British and Australian universities are grossly overrated and some excellent universities are ranked below 100 (like UVA for example). Also, some US universities that aren't better than other US universities are ranked above them.</p>
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If you can come up with justifiable criticism of the methodology, all well and good.
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<p>Okay, let's try this (note: I don't really like any of the rankings; I don't mean to hate on this one as opposed to others, this one just happens to be the thread topic):</p>
<p>They take international students ratio and international faculty ratio as major factors of ranking. I do think that universities should strive to recruit the best minds from all over the world, but I don't actually think that these numbers are great university quality indicators.</p>
<p>Recruiter review - This is going to be skewed depending on which companies respond to their voluntary survey. If, say, a disproportionate number of respondents are financial services firms, the results will favor schools that have very good finance programs. If a disproportionate number, of, say, British companies respond, they're probably going to get results skewed in favor of British universities in this category. And they're going to have trouble getting the survey out to every company, and getting a representative sample of companies - large and small, different industries, etc - is difficult. I'm also a bit unconvinced that recruiter opinion is an actual indicator of university quality, though it's probably a good indicator of alumni job-seeking power.</p>
<p>Citations per faculty - What if a university has a relatively high number of younger faculty who have had less time to get cited? What if a university's strongest departments are in fields where there are just generally fewer papers published, and thus less chance of citation? What if a university has faculty working in a cutting-edge field where there aren't enough people in the field yet to boost the number of citations? All of these will cause the university to drop in these rankings. Also, their new database that provides this data covers a larger number of publications, which could mean more less-reputable publications.</p>
<p>And I continue to believe that student/faculty ratio, while not entirely useless, is somewhat overrated as a measure of university quality, and favors small schools.</p>
<p>U.S. news isn't sensible. it creates a one size fits all ranking system for hundreds of incredibly diverse institutions and changes its ranking criteria from year to year. in my opinion, it hold some weight, but not very much at all because all the top ranked schools are the ones that have name recognition and everyone knows are good anyway. plus people act like the difference between being ranked #2 and #3 is a huge difference and its not at all.</p>
<p>USNEWS is very good at separating schools into distinct tiers. Everyone knows Yale is just as good as Harvard despite the, what 2 differences in rank? You may think im speaking out of my ... butt right now, but if you look at the top 10 Times has put out ...</p>
<p>1 HARVARD University United States
2 University of CAMBRIDGE United Kingdom
2 University of OXFORD United Kingdom
2 YALE University United States
5 Imperial College LONDON United Kingdom
6 PRINCETON University United States
7 CALIFORNIA Institute of Technology (Caltech) United States
7 University of CHICAGO United States
9 UCL (University College LONDON) United Kingdom
10 MASSACHUSETTS Institute of Technology (MIT) United States</p>
<p>Several universities stand out because they don't belong in this highly selective, highly prestigious group. i'll leave it up to you to decide which universities these are. Example: UCL is ranked consistently ranked 6/7 in just the UK, i only see 3 UK schools ahead of it in this ranking.</p>
<p>UCL is ranked 5th in the UK by the Sunday Times, and 4th in europe by another respected INTERNATIONAL ranking. Lurker i bet your just disapointed with your universities performance?
The Fact is the ranking is based on the opinions of academics around the world, a very scientific approach as all reputable research is peer appraised. Also it is not biased against any coutry, 40% of respondents from america, 30% or so from europe/africa/middle east/ the other 30 or so from asia. sign up to the free trial and download the explaination why there is so much change from last year. the ranking this is more accurate than last year where academics could vote for their institution, also they has used Z scores. This means the one god like university in the world (HARVARD) does not skew reults of the other 199 colleges. <a href="http://www.thes.co.uk%5B/url%5D">www.thes.co.uk</a></p>
<p>I do agree that UCL is a little high, it is a college of UPenn quality.</p>
<p>ALso i think UK colleges have done well because of their reps in asia, especially imperial, ucl, kings and lse.
But attracting international students is important, because of globalisation.
it is also a measure of how good a college is because people are not going spend thousands of dollars on a worthless education. Any whether you agree or disagree with this variable it only makes up 5% of the overall score.
Have a look at the US news rankings and correlate it with the US colleges in the THES rankings, it is very very similar at the business end of the two tables. internationally no one cares who is 40th ranked in the US or asia, or UK</p>
<p>Actually i dont attend a college, and if we both agree UCL is too high, what are we arguing about</p>
<p>UPenn is wayyyyy better than UCL...</p>
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Don't call "silly" the most respected educational publication in the world.
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<p>This smacks of an ad populum argument. I personally don't care how much the general public (or other publications, or libraries, or whatever) thinks of the publication. I can think for myself -- and others here can, too. (Again, prestige in this case doesn't matter.)</p>
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Not really, considering that the publication explained why all of its changes in methodology were needed to make the rankings less biased on the outcome of specific individual measures. You can think of them as perfecting the ranking, not varying it.
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<p>Explaining them away doesn't make the change any less embarrassing. By publishing it last year, they were asserting that it was correct, both the ranking and the methodology (which go hand-in-hand, obviously -- the ranking is just a manifestation of the methodology's implications). We've established the variability in ranking is a testament to the ranking's reliability, and so follows that variability in methodology is a testament to the ranking's reliability (the ranking is just the numerical way of evaluating such a change). As such, I don't think it's very reliable -- why is this ranking more correct than last year's? How do I know that next year's won't be drastically different but "more correct"? Of course, the answer is that you must evaluate the methodology yourself, but the mere fact that the methodology changes with the wind lends little credence to the ranking as a whole. As a result, I'd discount it, though this is supposing that reliability is really a function of variability (obviously, I believe this).</p>
<p>MIT, Columbia > UPenn</p>
<p>This is definitely legit. Or moreso than USNews.</p>